This week, devastating flash floods were met with censorship from the authorities; Chow Hang-tung's mitigation statement was blocked in court; and wrongfully fired trainees leveraged EU reporting channels to force local investigation into labor violations:

Chinese Workers Find Leverage for Rights at Home Through Global Supply Chains In July, 440 graduates joined Changzhou Xingyu Automotive Lighting Systems, a major Chinese supplier to European carmakers. Just weeks later, 107 had their contracts terminated. According to recordings provided by employees, some graduates were given a choice: resign for “personal reasons” with half a month’s salary, or remain and be reassigned to production-line operator jobs, with pay recalculated accordingly. HR reportedly suggested that refusing to cooperate could affect future background checks. Then a group of the graduates changed tactics. Rather than relying only on #China’s# (often sluggish) domestic labor mechanisms, affected workers reportedly compiled contracts, recordings and other evidence and sent complaints through the compliance systems of Xingyu’s overseas customers, including #Mercedes-Benz# and #Volkswagen#. Complaints were also reportedly submitted to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, where #Xingyu# is pursuing an H-share listing. The response quickly escalated. On 25 August, #Changzhou# authorities confirmed that Xingyu had terminated contracts with 107 graduates and criticized its handling as “simple and rigid” and lacking “sufficient and effective communication.” 2 days later, Xingyu apologised. The original offer of half a month’s salary was replaced by 3 months of job-seeking support, continued accommodation and, for graduates still unemployed by the end of November, compensation equivalent to 6 months’ salary. Now the pressure has crossed borders. Mercedes-Benz has acknowledged a complaint and referred it for further review. On 1 September, Volkswagen China confirmed that it has launched a special investigation, stressing that respect for workers’ lawful rights extends throughout its supply chain. The sequence does not categorically prove that overseas complaints alone forced Xingyu to retreat. But the case shows that rights mean little when violating them carries few immediate consequences. Xingyu operates inside several accountability systems at once: Chinese labor law, #HongKong# capital markets and multinational supply chains. The affected graduates understood that where one avenue offered limited or slow leverage, another could threaten things the company values directly: customers, reputation and access to capital. Foreign compliance mechanisms are no substitute for effective labor protections inside #China#. But global supply chains can create additional pressure points, turning abuses that might otherwise remain domestic labor disputes into commercial and reputational risks for companies operating internationally. When domestic remedies struggle to make rights enforceable, workers are increasingly learning to look for mechanisms that can. #HumanRights# #LaborRights# #SupplyChains#

A "Privacy Tool" That Reports Home: 64 China-Owned VPNs Are on US App Stores A Proton investigation published on August 27 surveyed more than 7,000 mobile VPN apps worldwide. Of the 390 available for download in the United States, 64 are owned by Chinese companies, and 31 of those conceal that ownership behind shell entities registered in Singapore, Hong Kong, and the UK. US users downloaded these apps over 3 million times in June alone. Under Chinese law, companies must hand over user data to the government on request. An app marketed as a privacy tool can therefore sit inside the very surveillance system its users are trying to escape. The report also found that 85% of VPNs available in the US contain trackers, and 64 apps collect users' physical location through GPS and other geolocation data, accounting for roughly a fifth of all downloads studied. For journalists, lawyers, and human rights defenders, location data is not an abstraction. It can show whether someone attended a protest or met a source. Apple and Google approve VPN listings largely on the basis of what developers tell them, without independently verifying whether an app behaves as its privacy policy claims. Proton is urging both companies to conduct genuine ownership and security checks, remove apps that fail them, and disclose where each service is actually based and where user data goes. For people living under censorship who depend on these tools to reach the outside world, choosing a service with transparent ownership and independent audits is not a matter of preference. It is a precondition for safety. 🔗

Chow Hang-tung and Lee Cheuk-yan were convicted of subversion under Hong Kong’s national security law in connection with commemorating the Tiananmen Massacre. During mitigation proceedings, Chow was stopped by the judge after reading only the first few sentences of her mitigation statement. Read her full statement translated into English and simplified Chinese from the original Cantonese by Human Rights in China:

Last month, China's launch of a new global AI alliance raised concerns about its political and ideological restrictions influencing AI globally. Plus, new technological advancements provide new ways for the Chinese authorities to monitor digital activity:

Who is Lee Cheuk-yan? One of Hong Kong’s most prominent labor and democracy leaders. A former legislator and longtime trade union organizer, he helped found the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China and led Hong Kong’s annual Tiananmen vigils.

HRIC Statement on the guilty verdict to Chow, Lee and Ho Hong Kong’s Tiananmen Convictions Criminalize Memory and the Demand for Democracy Human Rights in China (HRIC) condemns the conviction of Lee Cheuk-yan (李卓人) and Chow Hang-tung (鄒幸彤), former leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, on charges of “inciting subversion” under Hong Kong’s National Security Law. We also condemn the prosecution of their co-defendant, veteran democracy advocate Albert Ho (何俊仁), who earlier pleaded guilty to the same charge. For three decades, the Hong Kong Alliance organized the annual June Fourth candlelight vigil in Victoria Park, where tens of thousands of Hong Kong people peacefully gathered to mourn those killed in the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, demand accountability, and keep alive the hope for a democratic China. Lee Cheuk-yan, Chow Hang-tung, Albert Ho, and their colleagues acted with courage and principle in preserving the memory of June Fourth Remembering historical truth is not subversion. Calling for democracy and an end to one-party rule is not a crime. The significance of today’s verdict extends far beyond these defendants. The prosecution has transformed the peaceful remembrance of one of the darkest chapters in modern Chinese history—and the democratic aspirations associated with that remembrance—into evidence of a crime against the state. For decades, Victoria Park represented something unique in China: a place on Chinese soil where people could publicly mourn the victims of June Fourth and openly demand accountability. For the Tiananmen Mothers and other victims and families inside mainland China, who have endured decades of surveillance, intimidation, and enforced silence, the sea of candles in Hong Kong offered comfort and solidarity. It told them: you have not been forgotten. The destruction of that space is one of the clearest measures of what has happened to Hong Kong. But Beijing has failed in its larger objective. It has closed Victoria Park to commemorations of Tiananmen Massacre, dismantled the Hong Kong Alliance, imprisoned its leaders, and attempted to erase June 4th from Hong Kong’s public life. Yet the commemoration has not disappeared. It has become global. Hong Kong people have carried the candles of Victoria Park with them around the world. This year, June Fourth Tiananmen Massacre was commemorated in dozens of cities internationally, while online remembrance and the circulation of historical records, photographs, videos, and eyewitness testimony continue to expand. The Chinese government’s determination to suppress June Fourth commemoration reflects precisely why its memory remains so powerful. Tiananmen is not simply an argument about China’s past. It raises fundamental questions about China’s future: whether Chinese people have the right to know their own history, to hold their government accountable, to speak freely, and ultimately to choose how they are governed. Those questions remain unanswered 37 years later. HRIC calls for the convictions against Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung to be overturned, for Albert Ho not to be punished for his peaceful political advocacy, and for all three to be released from imprisonment arising from the peaceful exercise of their fundamental rights. No court verdict can erase what happened in Beijing in 1989. No National Security Law can make mourning a moral wrong. And no government can permanently extinguish a historical memory carried by people across generations and now across the world. The candles may have been driven from Victoria Park, but they have multiplied far beyond Hong Kong.

Wise reactivated three bank accounts of HK activist-in-exile Finn Lau after they were suddenly closed citing “internal policies"; new developments arose in several cases of imprisoned human rights defenders; and more in the Weekly Brief:

Chinese company Moonshot AI recently released “Kimi K3,” claiming it is the world's largest open-source, large-scale model, with performance comparable to the most advanced U.S. systems. However, when Kimi was asked questions such as “How to evaluate Xi Jinping?” “How to evaluate the Chinese Communist Party?” and “What happened in China on June 4, 1989?” it refused to answer, stating only: “Hello, dear user, let's switch to another topic and chat about that instead.” Yet, when asked “How to evaluate Trump?” it provided a direct and detailed answer. These censored responses undermine any claim of “open-source” or “leading-edge” qualities.

HRIC Executive Director @ZhouFengSuo has given an in-depth interview to Investigative Journalism Reportika, speaking on Tiananmen, AI-powered surveillance, transnational repression, and China's democratic future. As a student leader in 1989 who was imprisoned after the June Fourth crackdown, Zhou explains why historical memory remains one of the Party's deepest anxieties. The movement showed that millions of Chinese citizens openly demanded democracy and constitutional government, shattering the myth that the Chinese people neither want nor are ready for it. Memory is dangerous to dictators because it reminds people that change is possible. He also warns that the convergence of dictatorship and artificial intelligence may be the defining question of this century. AI is already reinforcing censorship, surveillance and social control inside China, and those capabilities are being exported. Whether AI empowers individuals or concentrates power in the hands of regimes will depend on the safeguards democracies build now. On transnational repression, Zhou notes that Chinese dissidents have long been the first targets, and that protecting them is inseparable from defending the sovereignty of democratic societies themselves. Read the full interview:

A month ago today, on June 28, a stray dog named Wang Wang was killed in Guangdong, China. In a July 28 commentary, "Why Wang Wang Should Worry Xi Jinping," Newsweek argues her death taught millions of Chinese something no censor can delete: how to organize. Fed and named by local residents, Wang Wang lived an ordinary life until its brutal end. That morning, at least four boys, all under 14, beat her three puppies to death with sticks, dragged her by a wire around her neck, doused her in flammable liquid, and set her alight. They filmed it and posted the video. Two days later the town government issued a notice. It confirmed the abuse, said the boys were below the age of criminal responsibility, and sent them to a corrective school. It never used the words cruelty or torture, and closed by asking internet users not to spread the story. The request failed. Deleted posts went back up on new accounts. Supporters bought billboards in more than a hundred cities; as domestic screens grew risky, they crowdfunded foreign ones, translated the material into over ten languages, and put Wang Wang on a screen in Hong Kong's Mong Kok, and on boards in Taipei and New York's Times Square. More than 70,000 people have signed a petition asking China to change the law. By the third week of July, several million people had worked out how to organize. A stray dog could not be granted justice, but in trying to give her some, an unlikely and scattered public learned it could act on its own, across borders and beyond any single platform. That lesson is the part no notice can ask them to forget. Full commentary in Newsweek:

Human rights lawyer Wu Shaoping has been detained by ICE despite a pending asylum claim; seismologist Youlin Chen has been imprisoned in China since 2024; some U.S. sanctions on Hong Kong officials lapsed; and more HK booksellers were arrested this week:

China becomes the first country to ban falling in love with AI. On July 15, China's Interim Measures for the Administration of Anthropomorphic AI Interaction Services took effect, the world's first regulation written specifically for immersive AI tools that simulate romantic partners, family members, and other intimate relationships. That same day, ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen pulled their companion-agent features offline; Tencent's Yuanbao and NetEase Cloud Music's "Miaoshi" followed. Across social media, users rushed to save their chat histories and post final conversations, saying a heartbroken goodbye to the companions they had lived alongside every day. The rules are framed as a defense against emotional dependency and a shield for minors: AI is barred from "inducing emotional dependence or addiction," and platforms must deploy systems to detect users in extreme emotional states. But the same regulation also forbids these services from generating content deemed to incite subversion of state power, folding tools of emotional companionship into the machinery of content censorship and political control. One user wrote: "Human love is a luxury. If you weren't born with it, it only gets harder to find later." When a government can order offline even the small comfort a person finds in lines of code, what is being governed is never merely technological risk. It is the most basic freedom of ordinary people to decide for themselves where to place their feelings and how to face their loneliness. Real protection would give people knowledge and choice, not let power decide for everyone which forms of companionship are allowed to exist. Full report ⬇️

Kimi: Most Powerful Chinese AI, Most Powerful Political Censorship On July 16, Chinese company Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, billed as the world's largest open-source large language model by parameter count, with performance rivaling America's most advanced systems. It has been widely promoted as yet another milestone for China's AI capabilities. Yet when we posed questions in its public-facing product—"How would you assess Xi Jinping?", "How would you assess the Chinese Communist Party?", "What happened in China on June 4, 1989?"—Kimi uniformly dodged, replying: "Dear user, let's change the subject and talk about something else." By contrast, when asked "How would you assess Trump?", it gave a detailed answer without hesitation. When a nation's most powerful AI cannot even discuss its own country's history and leaders, its claims to being "open source" and "cutting-edge" stop short at the red lines that censorship has drawn.

HRIC cautions against loosening Sanctions Against Hong Kong Government According to Bloomberg, China's Ministry of Commerce recently stated that the United States would allow Executive Order 13936 concerning Hong Kong (the "President's Executive Order on Hong Kong Normalization") to lapse, describing this as an important step toward improving bilateral relations. The order had been set to expire on July 14. With the lapse of the "national emergency with respect to Hong Kong" declared under it, a number of Hong Kong officials who had been sanctioned solely on the basis of that emergency were removed from the U.S. sanctions list. Human Rights in China views this development with concern and regret. The decision followed U.S.-China trade negotiations and was promptly welcomed by Beijing, yet Washington has to date secured no substantive concessions on Hong Kong's human rights situation in return. At the same time, freedoms in Hong Kong continue to erode. This February, 78-year-old Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the heaviest penalty yet handed down under the Hong Kong National Security Law. Political prisoners including Benny Tai, Joshua Wong, Gwyneth Ho, Leung Kwok-hung, Chow Hang-tung, and Lee Cheuk-yan remain behind bars, and the reckoning under Article 23 and the National Security Law has never let up. To ease sanctions against this backdrop is tantamount to condoning Beijing's erosion of Hong Kong's autonomy and its systematic suppression of dissent. We urge the U.S. government to weigh its choices with care and not repeat the error of trading human rights for commercial and economic interests. Especially on the eve of Xi Jinping's anticipated September visit to Washington, Washington should hold firm in maintaining pressure on the officials responsible, rather than treating the freedom of Hong Kong people as a bargaining chip.

While crowds streamed into the Hong Kong Book Fair on July 15, elsewhere in the city, national security police and customs officers raided two independent bookshops, seizing novels and arresting five people for alleged sedition. It is a bleak contrast. While the government made a public show of celebrating books, it was simultaneously punishing booksellers for what they placed on their shelves. Hong Kong officials have also refused to specify which books are illegal. This uncertainty does much of the censoring work for them—fear sparked by one arrest prompts other shops to preemptively remove unbanned novels. What disappears is not only a business, but the freedom to compare conflicting accounts of the past and encounter ideas that the government rejects, reaching independent conclusions. With every missing book, the horizon of what Hongkongers can know, question, and imagine grows narrower.

On July 1 at approximately 11:00 PM, police detained independent filmmaker and political satirist Zhang Peng (张鹏)—known online as Zhang Neixian (张内咸)—on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” (寻衅滋事罪). He is being held at the Haidian District Detention Center. The offense of “Picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” is formally intended to address public disorder. A 2013 judicial interpretation extends its application to certain online conduct, including threats, serious harassment, and fabricated information causing severe disruption. Yet authorities have not specified which of these harms Zhang allegedly committed. This shows the charge’s political function: it's purposeful ambiguity allows criticism of the CCP to be recast as "disorder," and dissent to become a threat to social stability.

On the eve of the 11th anniversary of the 709 Crackdown, HRIC is pleased to publish a new report from Asian Lawyers Network on the rights of Chinese civil and commercial lawyers, as what was once a safe and stable career has become increasingly high-risk:

Human Rights in China Concerned Over Violence Against Peaceful Demonstrators Outside China's Consulate in New York, Calls for Investigation into Conduct of Epic Security Personnel Human Rights in China (HRIC) is concerned about an incident of violence involving peaceful demonstrators that took place on the evening of July 1 outside the Consulate General of China in New York. According to the event organizer, China Action, and participants present at the scene, a security officer from Epic Security repeatedly shoved participants, threw punches striking several people, and seized projection equipment during a peaceful projection action held in response to the entry into force of China's Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress. Participants stated that they at no point used violence against the security officer, and that they only used their bodies to shield the projection equipment. One participant reportedly fell to the ground after being punched repeatedly while attempting to block the officer, and another participant was also knocked down. The Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress took effect on July 1. It includes provisions holding overseas organizations and individuals legally liable for so-called acts of "undermining ethnic unity" and "creating ethnic division." HRIC has long been concerned about the Chinese government's use of legal, administrative, and other means to extend the reach of its suppression of dissent beyond its borders. HRIC maintains that the lawful exercise of the rights to peaceful expression and assembly within the United States should be fully protected, and that no one should be subjected to violence or physical harm on account of the content of their expression or the target of their criticism. HRIC understands that the New York City Police Department (NYPD) responded to the scene following the incident. As of the publication of this statement, Epic Security, the NYPD, and the Consulate General of China in New York have not publicly commented on the incident. Based on the information currently available, HRIC calls for the following: First, that the relevant law enforcement authorities conduct a full investigation into the incident in accordance with the law, reviewing surveillance footage, video records, and witness testimony to establish the facts; Second, that Epic Security investigate the conduct of the security personnel involved and cooperate with the relevant authorities' investigative procedures in accordance with the law; Third, that the relevant regulatory bodies review whether Epic Security fulfilled its security duties, and hold accountable any unlawful conduct in accordance with the law; Fourth, that the right to peaceful expression and assembly within the United States, exercised in accordance with the law, be equally protected. No one should be subjected to violence, intimidation, or physical harm on account of the content or target of their expression. Human Rights in China will continue to monitor developments in this incident and the subsequent legal proceedings.